A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Jake Benson has been working in the Arts for over 10 years. As an actor, he has appeared in various theatre and screen productions including: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Greenside, Edinburgh); Years and Years (BBC/HBO); Iqbal Khan’s Of Mice and Men (Birmingham REP/Leeds Playhouse), the BAFTA qualifying film, First Sight, and most recently, Trainspotting. Alongside this, he has provided his voice for the LEGO video game franchise; The King’s Man; and podcasts Shadows at the Door; and The NoSleep Podcast. As a writer, Jake debuted his first play How to (Politely) Dispose of One’s Mother in 2015 to a sell-out run, followed by an industry reading in London in 2023, it is now in development as a co-production with some of the UK’s major theatres. In 2021, he founded his own production company, Smoke & Shadow Productions. As of 2024, the company has five productions in development stages, 2 plays, 2 audio dramas and a short film, all with bases around the globe. Most recently, Jake is developing a new musical production which has been commissioned for development with Birmingham REP theatre. He is a frequent collaborator with Music Producer and Composer, Will Fox, the creator of Shadows at the Door, Mark Nixon, and award-winning filmmaker, Andrew McGee. Jake is a guitarist, frequently playing in London (playing several gigs at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios) and across the UK. He is a member of the Kiln Theatre Collective, MESSY Collective and is based between Birmingham and London. He is also multi-lingual speaking English, German and French.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.